FACEBOOK PUSHES ORGAN DONATIONS

Nearly 7,000 people in the United States die each year while waiting for an organ transplant. It is a number that Facebook hopes to lower with its vast network of 161 million members in this country.

In a rare foray into social engineering, the social networking company announced a plan Tuesday to encourage Facebook users in the U.S., as well as the United Kingdom, to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.

The Facebook status will appear with other biographical information in a section called Health and Wellness. This feature will also lead to links to state online donor registries, where people can change their donor status; or they can still do so by visiting the local motor vehicle department.

Facebook, which has about 900 million members globally, plans to add the change in several other countries in the coming months.